Death's Fear
by Neneithel
Summary: The new Death has something troubling her.


_**Death's Fear.**_

Death was not of a nervous disposition. What was she supposed to fear? Herself? She knew the answers to the cosmic questions that kept mortals awake at night. Of course, she never slept. She was what you might call deadicated.

Okay, bad puns sometimes caused her a moment's disquiet. Fear, though, was not a major part of her experience. She was an entity of incredible power who needed no flowing black robes to bring with her the sound of stone slabs sliding into place and the smell of ancient graves. She was man's eternal dread. She was what they drank to forget. She inspired fear. She rarely felt any.

She was aware that she was not invulnerable. After all, she had inherited the job from her predecessor. Following his mistake, she had added another small sign to the wall of her study. Right next to, "No deals, no exchanges." she had put "Never trust a Winchester." She was not really afraid of the Winchesters. She was still Death and she was not about to do anything stupid, like let Dean Winchester touch her scythe. He was infinitely less powerful than she was and besides, he was a lot less cocky these days. She wasn't afraid of them, just sensibly aware of their proximity to any weapon that could kill her and careful not to give them the chance.

She loved her job. She enjoyed responsibility and had a healthy pride in her power. She liked almost all of her vast reading room and the whole of her simple, but comfortable home. She liked the study, inherited, as all else had been, from the previous Death. Weighty tomes of philosophy filled the shelves there, most of them filled with his marginal notes and the occasional doodle. He had been a distant, aloof employer, but not unkind. She had been fond of him.

His journals took up a whole storeroom off from the office and she read them often. They were full of wisdom, dry humour and recommendations of various food outlets. The Winchesters featured a lot in his recent ones. She would pass on to the Reapers the things they needed to know, but, like the pile of Supernatural novels under his desk, the fanfic would remain a secret. She owed him that.

Death was good at her job. She was efficient, cool, calm and confident. The dead respected that. When she reaped you, you knew you had been reaped. She took no pleasure in ending lives, although there were a couple of lives she would feel a grim satisfaction in bringing to their final close, but she took pride in doing the job well and treating every soul like the only soul. She would call them by name, look them in the eye and treat them with respect.

Although her promotion had been arbitrary - due only to the timing of her death and not to any inherent qualities of hers - she felt she was the right Reaper for the job.

It rankled a little that the cause of her promotion had been Castiel. She had not disliked the angel until he stabbed her, but she found it distasteful that any celestial being would kill a Reaper purely for the sake of a couple of humans, purely because he had decided to be their friend.

However, it had worked out well for her and she had enjoyed explaining it to Dean Winchester. He had been as disappointed as she had hoped. The Reaper he most disliked had become far more powerful because of the actions of his angel associate. She was also, of course, the Reaper who most disliked him. Her voice dripped with contempt whenever she had to speak to him and she hoped he would always be acutely aware of that.

And if, after he was sent back to his life again, she allowed herself a wry smile at something he had said or a glimmer of admiration for the only human who spoke to her exactly as he would speak to a motel clerk who had messed up his booking or if sometimes, she was not sorry to see him go back, well, her predecessor had his secrets and she had hers.

Yes, there were a few fears in her life and one of them was that Dean Winchester's charm and arrogance and even his burden of guilt were beginning to wear down her carefully built edifice of disdain and disapproval and she was starting to like him. She told herself that his final death would be a good thing for both of them.

Which brings us to the biggest of her fears. The object of this fear was very concrete and very specific. It dwelt in the reading room, in the vast W section, the Winchester part, of course. All of those books containing the many possible deaths of Dean Winchester intrigued and sometimes delighted her. She read them for pleasure when he had annoyed her again and wondered idly which one would come to pass, but she had only picked up the one that scared her once. She didn't need to read it again. She had no problem remembering every word - that is, both of them.

All those books, listing every way Dean Winchester might die, often in such lurid detail that she was tempted to add a few doodles of her own, but in one book, just two words that would have haunted her dreams if she ever slept. She had opened it unaware of the horror within, expecting another new way in which Dean could die. She had been unprepared for the words she saw.

"He doesn't."


End file.
